Project #9. Design Portrait

Description & Design Process

From November 16th to November 22nd, I collected the data of calls I made or received. Each data point has a list of information, including date, day of week, whom I talked to, type of call, kind of app that I used to make a call, and duration of call. The duration is calculated in minute. The length of each bar should reflect the duration of the call. I intended to color-coded each person but couldn't finish in time so I'll expand on that later. The bars are in consecutive order so the first bar represents the first call that I made in this week.

After I selected this topic(calls), the voice wave figure instantly came up to my mind. I thought it would be fun if each datapoint is drawn as one bar of the wave. First, I tried to use two loops to make the voice wave figure but I managed to center-aligned each bar to get the goal. I wanted to animate them as they are waving but couldn't figure out how to separately move each bar in a for loop. I would like to work more on that before the final submission.

Reflection

The self-traking process was both interesting and, to be honest, annoying. Even though my topic is automatically logged in the device that I used while I was taking a call, it gives me a weird anxiety that keeps me from fully focusing on my daily lives. On the other hand, it was very intrigging to see whom and how much I usually talk to in this qurantine. It somewhat feels like making a list of people who I am truly close with in these days. Also, I was able to figure out which app has the best connectivity while I was looking over the number of calls and duration of them. Once I finished collecting the week of data by myself, the data issue feels more real to me than before. It was because I could understand the dataset more clearly than the other big data stuffs on the internet and it contained my very personal information like who I virtually spent most time these days.